Poetry Quotes
Alexander Pope leads, followed by Florence Earle Coates, Muriel Rukeyser and Horace. Samuel Johnson’s definition in Lives of the English Poets (1779), poetry as the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason, is the best-sourced entry, and Thoreau’s couplet from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is the saddest: his life was the poem he would have written, but he could not both live it and utter it.
Flagged: “All poetry is misrepresentation,” credited to Jeremy Bentham and disputed; a triplet on three poets from three distant ages, credited to Dryden and disputed; and “The crown of literature is poetry,” credited to Somerset Maugham and marked misattributed.
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth!
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.